California’s Central Valley is the state’s most agriculturally intensive region and heavily dependent on groundwater. It is also home to the state’s largest population of domestic well reliant communities.
During the 2012-2016 drought, approximately 2,500 domestic wells failed in the Central Valley leaving tens of thousands of people without a reliable source of drinking water, which drew national attention and federal intervention.
Hundreds of thousands upwards to a million Californians rely on domestic wells for drinking water.
How will a 1, 2, 3 or 4 year long drought affect domestic well failure in California’s Central Valley?
Are well failures more associated with particular social factors (i.e. - median income, ethnicity)?
Can machine learning models predict domestic well failure from climatological variables, and if so, what does climate change imply for domestic well vulnerability?
Seasonal groundwater level measurements [left panel] from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) were used to interpolate water levels [middle panel] representing the shallow, to semi-confined Central Valley aquifer system.
Along with DWR well construction data on the location of domestic wells [right panel] and well pumps, a spatial model of well failure was built and calibrated to actual well failure in during the 2012-2016 drought.
As groundwater levels fall, shallow wells are more at risk of drying out than deep wells.